There are plenty of cryptocurrency exchanges in Australia, and it is hard to compare which has the lowest fees and spreads if you are only seeing advertisements from the exchanges themselves. Sure, it is easy enough to find the percentage fee that each exchange charges (for example, 0.5% per transaction on Digital Surge, or free on Crypto.com), but what many newcomers to crypto forget to factor in is the spread. This is why we conducted our thorough test on four top crypto exchanges (Digital Surge, Swyftx, CoinSpot and Crypto.com) to see which has the lowest fees and spread combined.

What is spread?

The spread is the difference between the buy and sell price of the same cryptocurrency, calculated as a percentage of the buy price. The lower the spread, the more money you are keeping in your pocket.

Which crypto exchange has lowest fees & spread?

We had previously conducted a basic Bitcoin buying test, where Digital Surge and Swyftx topped the list, so we suspected these two exchanges would come out on top again in this more rigorous test. However, we were quite surprised with the results, because Digital Surge beat Swyftx by a much larger margin than we expected. Digital Surge was the clear winner, averaging 1.42% in combined fees and spread for a buy and sell transaction. In second place was Swyftx, averaging 2.21%, third was Crypto.com, with 3.93% and finally CoinSpot with 4.25%. 

Since a usual transaction on a crypto exchange would be either a buy OR sell, and not a buy AND sell like we did in our test, a good way of portraying the average fee per transaction would be to divide the figures above by two. In the table below, the Average Fee is for a single trade (buy OR sell).

Test: Buy and sell $1000 AUD of 10 popular coins, on each exchange

We decided that the best way to test the fees was to buy crypto on each of the four exchanges at the same time, then sell it as fast as humanly possible (within about 10 seconds). This would mean that the amount we lost in AUD was from the combined spread and fees taken by the exchange, and not by fluctuations in market price.

We chose 10 coins for the test

Since some exchanges may have different spreads for different coins, we thought the best way to test the overall spread and fees was to pick a range of ten popular coins. We chose the top five coins by market capitalisation (BTC, ETH, BNB, ADA and XRP), then we picked the 10th, 15th, 20th, 25th and 30th coins (by market cap). If a coin was not available on all four exchanges we chose the next one in the list in order of market cap.

The final list of coins that we tested was BTC, ETH, BNB, ADA, XRP, UNI, LTC, ALGO, VET and THETA.

How we conducted the test

For each of the ten selected coins, we bought $1000 worth at the same time on the four platforms, then immediately sold the entire amount, to see how much AUD was remaining. The difference between this amount and $1000 was the amount lost to the exchange in fees and spread.

Summary of Results

I have summarised the results into a table below. To clarify, the percentages shown are the combined fees and spreads taken by the exchange when a buy order followed by an immediate sell order was conducted. It is NOT the fee for a single transaction.

Let's take BTC as an example. For Digital Surge, we bought $1000 AUD of BTC, then immediately sold all of it. We were left with $988.51, a loss of $11.49, which is 1.15% of the total amount we bought. Compare that to Swyftx, where we bought $1000 AUD of BTC, and sold it all for $982.72, a loss of $17.28 (1.73%). 

(Scroll across the table to compare all four exchanges)

Breakdown of Results: Coin by Coin

For those that are interested, I have included the results for each coin that we tested, including screenshots of the transactions.

Note: When using Crypto.com, it is not possible to select how much fiat currency to purchase. For example, you cannot type in $1000 AUD when you want to buy BTC. Instead, you can only select the amount of BTC which will give you the AUD value. For this reason, the screenshots may show a value that is slightly above or below $1000 when purchasing on Crypto.com; by the time we went to the Confirm Buy screen, the price fluctuations meant that the AUD value has changed. However, this small error of a few cents is insignificant when compared to a transaction of $1000, and was the best we could achieve in our test circumstances.

Other factors when comparing crypto exchanges

Having the lowest spread and fees is important, but there are many other factors that you should take into account before choosing a cryptocurrency exchange. Ideally, you want a platform that is easy to use, has plenty of coins, is trustworthy, legitimate, has Live Chat support, top-notch security and additional features.

I won't go in-depth here, as this article is about the fees and spreads, but if you are interested to find out more, you can read our article on the best crypto exchanges for Aussies. You can also check out individual reviews for the four exchanges used in our test: Digital Surge, Swyftx, Crypto.com and CoinSpot. 

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